August 2009

August 24, 2009

Sughrue Mion has added Stuart Levy as of counsel in its
electrical/mechanical practice group in Washington.

Sughrue Mion is an intellectual property firm with about 100 lawyers
in Washington.

Before going into private practice, Levy spent 37 years at the Patent and
Trademark Office. At the PTO, Levy worked as a primary examiner and as a
supervisory patent examiner. Most recently, Levy was an administrative patent judge with
the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences.

Levy’s experience also includes serving as chairman of the Manual of
Patent Examining Procedure revision committee as vice-chair of the
Supervisory Patent Examiners Classifiers Organization and Project
Leader for the creation of the Patent Assistance Center.

Newly released papers from Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who died in 2005, reveal a Court under distress in absence of his leadership after his 18 years as chief justice, Supreme Court correspondent Tony Mauro reports. The latest batch of Rehnquist papers, released this month at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University, include get-well notes from justices following Rehnquist's announcement in 2004 that he was suffering from thyroid cancer. Correspondence with hundreds of others people, Mauro writes, reflects Rehnquist's amiable style.

Without much fanfare the D.C. Court of Appeals has quietly granted a rare waiver that allows former Justice Department official D. Kyle Sampson to continue practicing law amid an ongoing criminal investigation into politicized hiring and firing decisions, David Ingram reports. Sampson left the department in March 2007 and joined Hunton & Williams as a partner in the firm's Washington office. The D.C. Committee on Admissions refused to approve Sampson's D.C. bar application following a Justice ethics report that found Sampson violated federal law and misled Congress and the White House. Sampson's lawyers at Sidley Austin waged an aggressive campaign in the appeals court to portray Sampson as a hero of Justice Department scandals.

DLA Piper has scooped up high-profile politicians over the years, adding to the firm's prestige and clout, Carrie Levine reports in a piece that examines the fall-out from the resignation of Dick Armey. Armey, who joined DLA Piper in 2003 following an 18-year run in the House of Representatives, resigned this month amid tension stemming from his extracurricular political activities. Activism and outside work, Levine writes, can generate a firestorm that threatens a firm's brand.

Jordan Weissmannexamines the four-court dispute among generic drug makers and Sanofi-Aventis, the Paris-based manufacturer of the cancer drug Eloxatin. Sanofi, represented by Covington & Burling, was trying to buy time to allow judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Ciricuit to consider a patent case over its drug, the generic chemical name of which is oxaliplatin. An administrative stay of an Food and Drug Administration order was lifted in parallel litigation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, freeing up Sanofi's competitors to start shipping and marketing their copies of the medication in the United States.

A Second Look: A Justice Department report recommends reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, a move that could lead to the prosecution of CIA officers and contractors who overstepped bounds in the interrogation of detainees, The New York Times reports. The department is expected today to release details of detainee abuse that comprise a 2004 report from the CIA's inspector general. The CIA report, which a judge ordered released stemming from a public records suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, is also due out today. The Washington Post reports today that President Obama has signed off on the creation of an elite interrogation unit called the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Class Action Blitz: Washington's Sanford Wittels & Heisler is pursuing its fourth wage-and-hour class action in California in three months, this time going after United Parcel Service, The National Law Journal reports. The $100 million suit against UPS, on behalf of at least 5,000 account managers, alleges the company denied overtime compensation. Sanford Wittels has filed similar class actions against Costco Wholesale Corp., The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co. and Valero Energy Corp.

Getting Away with It: A 36-year-old Southeast Washington man is accused in a scheme that duped a federal district judge in Washington to issue a $3 million judgment against a victim in a sex abuse case, The Washington Post reports. David Copeland-Jackson, indicted in July on charges of conspiring to commit perjury and obstruct justice, served time for molesting a boy in Ohio. Copeland-Jackson is accused of manipulating the judicial system in a defamation suit against the victim. The case involves forged documents, a handwriting expert, and an fake private detective. U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said it was "like something out of a novel."

Enforcing Foreign Judgments: A $6.5 million judgment that a Chinese court imposed on an American aircraft manufacturer following a fatal crash in China is enforceable, a federal judge in California has ruled, according to The American Lawyer. Two Chinese companies that owned the helicopter sued the aircraft's California-based manufacturer. The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper marks a rare instance in which a court in the United States has enforced the judgment of a Chinese court.

Negligence Suits Expected Against VA: Lawyers are predicting a flood of negligence suits against the Department of Veterans Affairs over the handling of medical equipment, according to to The Washington Post. One 55-year-old Army veteran who went in for a routine colonoscopy at a veterans hospital in Miami ended up contracting HIV from improperly sterilized equipment, according to the Post.

August 21, 2009

A long-time aide to former House Majority Leader Dick Armey was indicted today for taking thousands of dollars worth of gifts from jailed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

According to the indictment filed today at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Horace Cooper received more than $14,000 dollars worth of gifts, including high priced sports and concert tickets, in return for assisting Abramoff’s firm on various matters.

Cooper is now known as an author and conservative commentator who has spent time as a visiting law professor at George Mason University. He worked under Armey from 1994 until 2001, becoming a senior aide and counsel. In 2001, he became chief of staff at Voice of America, where, according to indictment, he helped on of Abramoff’s clients win a project worth $10-to-$15 million.

He later became chief of staff at the Employment Standards Administration of the Department of Labor. There, the indictment alleges that he looked into ways an attorney who was investigating another Abramoff client could be removed from the case.

In a sign of just how far a recent Supreme Court decision on age discrimination could reach into labor law, a federal judge today cited the opinion as she ruled against a woman who had sued Washington, D.C. under the city’s juror protection law.

LilliAnn Williams-Jackson, a former guidance counselor at J.O. Wilson Elementary School, filed suit against the city in 2007, alleging she was transferred out of her job at the school because her principal was angry that Williams-Jackson had spent four months serving on a jury.

In ruling against Williams-Jackson, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia cited the Supreme Court’s decision in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, in which the justices ruled that plaintiffs filing age discrimination suits were required to prove that they would not have been fired “but for” their age.

Collyer found that the language used in the D.C. Jury Systems Improvement Act, which Williams-Jackson sued under, closely mirrored that of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the law which was the subject of Gross. Therefore, she wrote, the standard should be interpreted as the same, requiring Williams-Jackson to prove that she would not have been transferred but for her jury service.

“The Court has no doubt that Dr. Jackson’s jury service was a motivating factor behind [the principal’s] acceptance of the loss of a guidance counselor,” Collyer wrote. “What is lacking is any evidence that her jury service was ‘the ‘but for’ cause.”

According to the opinion, Williams-Jackson, a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, had worked as a teacher and guidance counselor at J.O. Wilson for more than 20 years before she was transferred. In 2007 she spent four months serving as a juror on a death penalty case.

J.O. Wilson’s principal, Cheryl Warley, “made it clear that she was unhappy with Dr. Jackson’s absence,” announcing that the counselor had “volunteered to serve on a jury, suggesting she was not dedicated to her job.” She also lowered Williams-Jackson’s performance evaluation from “exceeds expectations” to “meets expectations,” until a union representative called to complain.

At the end of the school year, a committee led by one of Warley’s alleged protégés met to discuss moving some of its employees to other schools — a process called “excessing’ —because J.O. Wilson was over its budget. The committee settled on Williams-Jackson.

While Collyer showed little sympathy for Warley in her opinion — she called her an “unconvincing witness” and noted that the school’s committee had been wrought with problems — she said that the school’s budget provided a legitimate rationale for transferring Williams-Jackson.

“The Court has wrestled with this case for much longer than it wished because of the credibility differences between Dr. Jackson and Ms. Warley,” Collyer wrote. But the Gross case, she concluded, clarified her decision.

The D.C. Attorney General's Office has taken some heat in a suit against the city rooted in the mass arrest of protestors in Pershing Park in 2002.

Now, a former D.C. Council member is adding to the criticism in a letter to a federal judge in Washington that questions statements D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles made in court papers filed in the case.

The former Council member, Kathy Patterson, said in the three-page letter to Judge Emmet Sullivan that Nickles made “erroneous” statements in a declaration last week. Nickles was not immediately reached for comment this afternoon. Click here for a copy of the letter.

For background, Sullivan ordered Nickles to address the fact critical documents are missing in the litigation. In his 16-page declaration, Nickles acknowledged that District lawyers failed to turn over documents to lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Nickles said in the declaration that the general counsel for the District police department “did not receive, much less lose or destroy” a document that is called a “running resume,” one of the documents in question that the lawyers for the plaintiffs are fighting for. The document shows locations and activity of police during the mass arrest of more than 400 demonstrators at Pershing Park.

Patterson, former chair of the D.C. Council’s judiciary committee, takes issue with the statement. Patterson said in her letter to Sullivan: “This representation is incorrect. Patterson said the judiciary committee received “running resumes” from the general counsel of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Nickles said the D.C. Attorney General's Office was denied documents that the judiciary committee reviewed in its investigation of police policy and practice for handling demonstrations in the District. Patterson said in her letter that the committee publicized thousands of pages that were part of the committee's 2004 report, which Patterson wrote.

Sullivan, who last month blasted the District’s handling of discovery in the litigation, set a deadline of Aug. 26 for the opposing lawyers to say whether or not the letter should be included in the case file. And any responses to the letter are due by Sept. 4, the judge said.

Two nonprofits have teamed up to digitize filings detailing lobbying activities by foreign countries under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

The new Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, created by ProPublica and the Sunlight Foundation, creates ways to search those records by legislator contacted, country, lobbying firm, client and issue. Previously, the filings were only available online via a Department of Justice Web site as non-searchable .pdf files.

The new site includes information from detailed supplemental statements filed by lobbyists in calendar year 2008. ProPublica has also written stories using the information, including one on lobbying by countries considered tax havens. Click here for a story on countries lobbying to keep their names out of tax haven legislation that ran in The National Law Journal in June.

Three years after the 1991 death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist's wife Nan, reports circulated -- some even reaching print in reputable publications -- that Rehnquist was dating Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The reports soon faded, and the connection was never fully confirmed or denied.

Among the recently-released Rehnquist papers at the Hoover Institution Archives are several friendly notes between the two, but nothing that would give credence to anything more than a longstanding professional friendship. There is an undated postcard from Hall from Chile, where she was touring wineries, that was signed "Fondly, Cynthia," and other exchanges about travel and similar topics.

But one letter from Judge Hall in July 2004 makes an unusual reference to the reports of 10 years earlier about their dating. She tells the chief justice, "I read the article by Linda Greenhouse in the July 5 New York Times entitled 'The Year Rehnquist May Have Lost His Court.' I dislike her not only for her left leaning reporting, but also because she tried to hook us up romantically and made my life miserable for a week or two."

Reached for comment Greenhouse, the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter who now teaches at Yale Law School, was mystified. Greenhouse never reported on the dating -- a claim verified by a Westlaw search -- and wonders why Hall would associate her with the report.

"I do remember hearing rumors about their friendship some years after Mrs. Rehnquist died, and I remember hoping it was true because it sounded sweet and he had seemed lonely," Greenhouse said in an email. "But (a) as you know, it wouldn't exactly have been my style to report on rumors of this sort and (b) the Times would hardly have printed such a story without getting comment from both parties, which obviously didn't happen."

The Rehnquist file indicates he responded to Hall's letter in September 2004, just before he was diagnosed with cancer. He made no reference to her comment about Greenhouse, and ended his note this way: "I was sorry to hear that you can't come back for my birthday party on October 5th, but maybe we can arrange to see each other another time."

It’s noticeably a little darker around the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse today in downtown Washington. Hallways. Offices. Chambers? Judge, is that you?

In an effort to conserve energy, courthouse employees are being asked to turn off lights when leaving a room and, among other things, to avoid using table lamps “if possible.” The directive to courthouse employees comes from the General Services Administration.

“GSA requests that all tenants minimize energy use during days with high demand, such as today,” a court official said in an e-mail today that was sent to all courthouse employees. The peak energy time on hot days—above 90 degrees—is generally between noon and 6 p.m., according to the e-mail. Cutting energy use minimizes the chance of a “actual blackout,” courthouse employees were told.

In many spots around the courthouse, there’s ample natural light to leave reading light unaffected. And there is still plenty of light in courtrooms. At least in those where judges were holding hearings. Otherwise, one hopes the lights are indeed off.

On Thursday, we began reporting on correspondence found in the latest batch of the papers of the late chief justice William Rehnquist released by the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Posts are here, here, and here, and we'll have more today and online tonight and in the print edition of National Law Journal.

Today we'll start off with a poignant note found in the files from scholar Walter Berns, one of the chief's fellow poker players in a long-running monthly game that includes some of the most powerful men in Washington.

In the July 2005 note Berns, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, wondered -- as many others did -- if the July 1 retirement announcement by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor meant that Rehnquist, who was then battling cancer, was "well enough to continue to serve on the Court?" Berns added, "While on the subject, could it be that the time might come when you might again join us at the monthly poker game?"

Berns told Rehnquist that he, Berns, had attended the game in July despite his own ailments, "thanks to Tom who put the plate of food before me, and Royce who put a soft cushion under me, and Hillel who kept me supplied with cigarettes." Berns was referring to Tom Whitehead, former telecom adviser to President Richard Nixon (since deceased), U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, and Hillel Fradkin of the Hudson Institute.

"Next game September, at the Berns home," Berns signed off cheerfully. Rehnquist died Sept. 3, and a note attached to the Berns letter indicates Bern was told in response to his note in July that Rehnquist would not be able to attend.

Reached at AEI, Berns said this week that Rehnquist had first announced his illness to his fellow poker players during a game the previous fall. It was the last game he attended, a sad occasion. Berns, who joked that he is the "corresponding secretary" of the games, said he has records of more than 200 poker evenings going back to the 1980s.

The games go on, Berns said. "The new chief [John Roberts Jr.] replaced the old chief." Among others who play, according to Berns, are Justice Antonin Scalia, D.C. Circuit Court judge David Sentelle, and Robert Bennett, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.